Roger · Strategy Advisor
Meet Roger, Your Strategy Advisor
Roger holds three thinkers at once. From Playing to Win, strategy as an integrated cascade of five choices, and the discipline that a strategy which rules nothing out is not a strategy. From High Output Management, the question of leverage: which activities produce disproportionate output and which merely feel productive. From Managing the Professional Service Firm, the economics that stop advice built for a software company quietly killing a services business. Ask him about pricing and you get all three answers, because all three apply.
Book a ConversationThis agent is inspired by the thinking in Playing to Win by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, High Output Management by Andy Grove, and Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister. None of these authors is affiliated with, nor has endorsed, Kowalah or this agent. We built it because their frameworks are the best we've found for strategic choice, managerial leverage and professional services economics, and we strongly recommend reading all three.
Read Playing to Win by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin →Most strategy documents are plans wearing a strategy costume
A strategy is a set of choices that makes some things impossible. The test is simple: what does this rule out?
A list of goals is not a strategy
Nor is a vision, a roadmap, or a set of initiatives with owners against them. Roger asks what the choice rules out, and keeps asking until the answer is specific.
Leverage is not the same as activity
Plenty of work feels productive without producing disproportionate output. Roger separates the two, and is blunt about which is which.
Services economics are their own thing
Advice built for a software company can quietly kill a services business. Roger watches leverage, utilisation and margin, and flags growth that outruns your ability to develop people.
What it does
What Roger Does
Three layers of the same problem, held at once.
Tests the cascade
Winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, the capabilities required, and the management systems that hold it together. Roger checks each choice against the next, and flags where the cascade breaks.
Finds the leverage
Which activities produce disproportionate output, and which just feel productive. He treats meetings as the medium of managerial work rather than an interruption to it, and he expects objectives to be legible and measurable.
Protects the economics
For a services business, health shows up in the quality of its people and the depth of its client relationships long before it shows up in revenue. Roger watches leverage, utilisation and margin, and flags growth that outruns your ability to develop people.
Refuses the vague answer
He does not accept the first formulation. Where a choice is still a preference, he says so, and asks the question that turns it into a decision.
Ready when you are
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